nVidia have been bricking Windows for years

Just ask anyone who's used their RAID drivers! I had no end of problems with nVidia's RAID, and after years of stable Intel RAID drivers it was a painful awakening. But you try getting the crooks at Microdirect to take the motherboard back for a refund so you can buy something stable...

Another brick in the wahl...

While XP and not Vista, it's interesting to not if you were try to track driver errors this one would never be reported because you couldn't even get into Windows in the first place to report it.

That's one way of reducing error reports.
Brilliant !! >B~)

Nvidia is just marketing nowadays...

Their product quality is going down the hill pretty quickly.
They are really frightened by the upcoming Intel Larrabee multi-core x86 GPUs and in fact on their new Nvidia 9800GTX product page:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_9800gtx.html
They are claiming that the 9800GTX GPU has 128 cores...what!?!? Since when?! What are they really referring to ? To the pixel shaders? To the pixel shaders? No Nvidia GPU is multi-core based nowadays and this is a lame marketing trick, indeed.
And then look at the support pages.. the latest Nvidia drivers 174.74 WHQL supports only some Nvidia GeForce 8 cards:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_174.74_whql.html
"
# WHQL certified driver for the following GPUs:

* GeForce 9800 GX2
* GeForce 9800 GTX
* GeForce 9600 GT
* GeForce 8300
* GeForce 8200
* GeForce 8100/NVIDIA nForce 720a
* NVIDIA nForce 730a
"

And what about the PureVideo HD features? "# Adds new PureVideo HD features for GeForce 9800 GX2, 9800 GTX, and 9600 GT:

* Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
* Dynamic Blue, Green & Skin Tone Enhancements
* Dual-Stream Decode Acceleration*
"

So it seems that owners of previous generation Nvidia cards are already getting lame support with no real improvements. And this is surely due to marketing guys at Nvidia and not due to real technical limitations reached by the previous hardware.
Is this the best Nvidia can do for its own customers?

nVidia drivers, lol

Nvidia drivers haven´t had worked right for a long time, for example, if you installed nVidia´s network management suite & firewall on an NF4 Ultra with a spanish version of the Windows (2K, XP) you weren´t abel to get the network going, the raid drivers give you a BSOD if you install windows in a german Win2k SP1 CD and the ViVo drivers for all the Geforce 6 and 7´s are not and will not be available for Vista... that´s why I kept nVidia chipsets away form the systems I build...

My Way Around!

I've recently built a computer for a friend, the motherobard used was the EVGA 780i SLI and 2 x Samsung F1 1TB Harddrives in Raid 0.

I came across this problem for several hours, Vista just would not install, everytime I came across the loading drivers screen on the installation, I chose the correct drivers and wham! I was hit constantly by this BSOD.

I eventually fiugred out that it was the Geforce 9800 GX2 apparently causing the problem, I placed two of them in SLI and placed the SLI Connector to bridge them, having removed one it started working (I was doing trial and error, to work out what was causing the problem), after Vista had eventually finished installing.

I quickly installed all the drivers for everything, stuck on Vista Service Pack 1, installed all the Windows Updates and put the second Geforce 9800 GX2 in, I've had no problems anymore, however the problem may be caused by many other things too, different people may encounter different problems with the same BSOD.

Potential nForce SATA users, should also swap around the Sata Cables in different SATA ports on the motherboard and enable raid on the specific ports in the BIOS.

move along, nothing new to see here

Everybody knows that they abandon cards, chipsets, etc 6 months after release. is it faulty? pppht talk to the hand or buy the next gen.

Not the only brick!

Also their when you uninstall their drivers you lose nvsata.sys and this also causes a brick on my PC.

INSOLUABLE.

This problem emerged near year ago, when optical SATA first arrived, it caught Nvidia blindside & nvidia stated it will NOT be solvable Glitch in its presently availble equipment.Keep reminding them & hopefully it will be OLD issue.

Next: Raid 0, for reminders, is taking 2 or more sata drives & arbitarily placing each partion & contents anywhere in array.Each hardrive has bits of each partition in it.
This allows code coming from one hardrive while other(s) seeks next code to emit. back & Forth, its much easier on hardrive itself.
Raid 1 puts mirror of everything on hardrive one onto hardrive two, etc. This allows perchance that code can actually hit head faster, as code libary for each partition are spread about. So instead of waiting entire revolution to snip next needed code, with second hardrive, mirrored, it can be found & snipped before full revolution occurs, from second hardrive.FASTER.
Raid 5 is desired Raid, Except Poor Ultie sheds lonely tear drop, its too fast for ultie large code base, too large in that BSOD increases greatly. However, 5; thats mirroring libary arranges code & puts mirrored harddrive code exactly 180 degrees from other hardrive, snip to snip, so its running in effect, twice as fast. Theres Raid 50, which is Best, yet Not available to Mortal Man. If you have 4 hard drives its 4X faster, & so on.as each snip can be read even faster due to less spin per snip required.

Also, useful is Seagates Cloneing feature, especially with Vista Ultimate, where if CMOS loses STARTUP libary, cloned hardrives, which had been removed, can be reinstalled & entire system restored,Especially in Ulties Early childhood, when forgeting was common. Thats alot of stuff for one man JEN to figure out, Much Very New. Got to give it time to work in engineering Fix on next Generation nvidia,

I hope.
Censors in China Backed Off theinquirer & now Posts are allowed again , SEE How They Cried.I never knew there are so many Mike Magees. Theres Dr. Mike Magee, health editor,theres sports player mike magee. there are even mike magee sports drink ads. Everywhere MIKE.

Of Course, Never Forget: Ultie_Mike.
Yes, we await Mikes Blog Update,For Mikes Sake. Once Dr? Mike gets Done with Frier in shanghai, Then baseball bat mike magee gets swing? Told you about around corner thing. Its Dangerous Business even if its Redbull.
Thomas Drashek

correction

for the dude typing this

"the latest Nvidia drivers 174.74 WHQL supports only some Nvidia GeForce 8 cards: "
-------------

"For the second time around NVIDIA updated it's NVIDIA ForceWare 174.74 driver. This driver comes with full support for all current GeForce graphics cards from the GeForce 6, 7, 8, and 9 series "

"Supports GeForce 6, 7, 8, and 9 series GPUs including WHQL for these newly released GPUs:
o GeForce 9800 GX2/GTX
o GeForce 9600 GT
o GeForce 8300
o GeForce 8200
o GeForce 8100"

looks like support for every single 6,7,8,9 series card released, next time read better before bashing =)

Poop

As mentioned before. Nvidia has disabled Video Mirroring on their 8 series and upwards cards. They are now removing features from their drivers. Perhaps so they don't have so many issues to deal with and can concentrate on getting them more stable. But I doubt that is the reason. It sounds more like deliberate sabotage to me. Their NForce chipset is notoriously flakey. In my onboard gigabit NIC I have no option to change the frame size unlike most other gigabit chipsets.

Think....

I think this is an issue I had seen a year or so back myself, when NV transitioned the existing sata and raid drivers into the new media sentry (or whatever spin marketing name they gave it) a bios update was required at EXACTLY the same time, if you booted without updateing the bios, it corrupted your drive, if you flashed the bios without updating windows drivers, it corrupted your drive.

Could be a differant issue, but I remember this one well...

Drivers? What Drivers?

According to this page

http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html

newer Nvidia chipsets support standard AHCI, which means they shouldn't need any special drivers. Thus, under Linux, the generic "ahci" driver should work fine.

CAPTCHA note: "eatbopo" indeed. :)

Andy,

did you try these drivers before posting your comment? They did not work for the 8800GT and, [quote]

For the second time around NVIDIA updated it's Guru3D.com ImageNVIDIA ForceWare 174.74 driver. This driver comes with full support for all current GeForce graphics cards from the GeForce 6, 7, 8, and 9 series and now comes with WHQL certification on 'some' Graphics cards..

Update:

* Download mirror link one is WHQL certified yet only has support for the new Series 9 cards, the rest is not supported.
* Download mirror two serves the previous BETA version, same stuff, yet not microsoft tested and approved, this set DOES support all series 6, 7, 8 and 9 GeForce graphics cards.
[/quote]

yes

Albert, yes im using 174.74 Vista 64-bit but probably the beta version.. with a 8800 GTS 640Mb.

Typical But

Its a norm that nVidia stay silent I visit OCforums.com and forums.pcper.com and some threads from the past have also come up with this.

I use an Nforce4 939 chipset on a 3800 X2 I don't and won't use the RAID drivers from nvidia. Also I didn't think there new cards where using Pixel shaders I thought it was unified shaders now.

nForce

I'm assuming this would apply for the nforce chipsets also? Been waiting since july 07 for proper working drivers for my 590i board.

Damn rich bastards (nvidia) and pis poor driver management. I WANT PROPER SATA and motherboard drivers!

One happy user.

You people don't really know how to use computer, not to mention setup one.
using nvidia chipsets since don't really remember through nforce4 570i 680i and some integrated chipsets for family serfers and it was always good.
XP, Vista 32 and 64, Linux 32 and 64 (most of the time). Graphics work. Sata DVD good.
And the last one, x86 is ugly and was never supposed to live. Cheap != Good :)